This may be a “hot” one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my “bias”, well I have always been “pro nuclear”. So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.

Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.

TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)

  • Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.

  • Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no “safe limits” of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.

  • If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.

  • Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.

  • Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.

And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get

  • Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.

Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like

  • solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big “stability” bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.

  • wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.

  • hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.

  • Dimand@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 day ago

    Yes, and it’s a statistically insignificant amount of data with a strong genetic correlation that can’t be taken out. The scientific result is we still don’t know, more data is required. But how do we ever get such data?

    • turdas@suppo.fi
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      Thousands or tens of thousands of people is not statistically insignificant.

      • Dimand@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        In the case where you are trying to distinguish a shift in cancer rates at the 1 in 1000 level it is statistically insignificant, because your now measuring hit rates in the single digits and trying to distinguish that from other cancer causing factors that are probably at the 1 in 100 level or less (i.e, old people get breast and prostate cancer).

        • turdas@suppo.fi
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          Cancer rates are not 1 in 1000. Something like 40% of people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives.